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# Screaming Mad George left behind exactly one video game
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/screaming-mad-george-left-behind-exactly-one-video-game/
- Published: 2026-09-14T18:00:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T18:00:18.000Z
- Description: Paranoiascape sent a burning brain through nine levels of hell
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: News, Screaming Mad George, Pinball, PlayStation, Horror, Obituary, Practical Effects, Japan, music

The cover of *Paranoiascape* is a field of grasping red hands with a PlayStation logo tucked into the corner, and I keep returning to how completely it refuses to look like a game from 1998\. Screaming Mad George—born Joji Tani in Osaka, dead in February at 69, though [the family only announced it last month](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcH0PuHE-wo/?ref=killscreen.com)—made exactly one game, and it is the strangest object on the console.

It is a pinball game. It is also first-person: you stand behind the flippers, in 3D, and you can walk. Nine levels, a life bar, and a burning brain for a ball, which you knock down organic corridors past giant syringes and human cockroaches toward the exit. A studio called Mathilda developed and published it, then never made another game. It never left Japan. [Hardcore Gaming 101](https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/paranoiascape/?ref=killscreen.com) has the only serious English write-up.

What lifts it above oddity is that it was not a detour. George called the method Anti-Realism—nothing digital, everything built by hand—and it is the same method behind the closing orgy of *Society*, behind Freddy Krueger and the Predator, behind the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer" and Slipknot's masks. "Paranoiascape" was also already a song: track two on *Transmutation*, the 1993 album by the visual kei band Screaming Mad George & Psychosis. The PlayStation disc was not a licensing exercise. It was the fifth or sixth medium the same body of work walked into, and it happened to be the one with flippers.

There is a line George gave about the whole practice: "I don't like real violence, but I like created violence... I don't like anything that is real." That is a stranger thing to say about latex than about a videogame, which is probably why the jump to a disc was barely a jump at all. A curation account for obscure games [put the game back in circulation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcIDl-NjXnO/?ref=killscreen.com) in August, pegged to the news.

We once asked whether [pinball could tell a story](https://www.killscreen.com/can-pinball-tell-story/). This is the most deranged available yes.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p03.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p05.png)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p07.png)

From the Japanese manual: the Screaming Mad George profile page, the first-person flipper view, and the controller map. Scans via the Internet Archive.

Killscreen goes looking for the games nobody filed correctly—the Japan-only pinball hell made by a latex artist, the album that turned into a disc. The free newsletter is where those land first.

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